mobile device was drawn to the time. raising money to help those in need but this is not a normal telethon supporting a normal cause we'll take you to the occupy jubilee telethon that's collecting cash to buy a debt and then forgive it details just ahead. and what really happened during the benghazi attack in libya as washington plays the blame game congress gets to hear from the head of the cia himself general david petraeus yes that guy the one who resigned last week because of a sex scandal or a poor from capitol hill on today's testimony in just a minute. and so the t.s.a. madness they've bought up those very expensive very invasive body scanners now some of them are going into storage so what can travelers look forward to the next time

they head to the airport we'll tell you coming up. it's friday november sixteenth five pm in washington d.c. i'm meghan lopez and you're watching r.t. . all right well all week here at r t we've been telling you about the rolling jubilee real world debt solutions with the occupy movements unique brand last night the rolling jubilee hosted a telephone and a variety show in order to raise money they plan on taking that money to buy up consumer debt for pennies on the dollar and in a race that debt forever or as the organizers describe it a bailout of the ninety nine percent by the ninety nine percent are to correspondent on a stasia churkin i was at last night's telethon and brings us this report. oh and. the rolling jubilee fund raising project to

a race of huge born on american society debt thanks to the evil genius of the distress that. every dollar you give us we used to buy twenty dollars that somebody . supporters lined up to contribute at the kickoff of that november fifteenth the first steve we all know someone who has had to mortgage their home for medical expenses or you know students who put. an end food on credit cards in order to get by through the semester a dozens of trillions of dollars debt is crippling seventy seven point five of american households that collectors hound one in seven americans rolling jubilee organizers say this isn't an example of people living out of their means nearly two thirds of all bankruptcies have medical bills as a contributing factor over three hundred billion dollars of credit card debt in the united states was used to pay for basic necessities that's just wrong strike debt

a child of occupy wall street sets out on a mission to help billions of dollars worth of debt eradicated in the bank bailout it's time for a bailout of the ninety nine percent by the ninety nine percent their tactic buying distressed debt for pennies on the dollar and then simply abolishing it people will get a phone call saying you know instead of getting a phone call from a collections agency they'll get one phone call saying hey occupy wall street bought your debt it's been abolished and if you feel like helping you know give us five bucks to help somebody else the groups are past its initial goal raising fifty thousand dollars to abolish a million and debt through online donations five dollars and the telephone in a blink of an eye and twenty five dollars a pop tickets were completely sold out several days in advance and only one is enough to abolish five hundred dollars worth of debt the overall amount in donations so far hundreds of thousands of dollars raised to wipe out several million and. and counting these guys have done a really good job at saying this is a real issue we're going to figure out

a way to make it happen we need your help we need all of us to do this for all of us still some economists say it's a drop in the bucket comparing effectiveness to giving teeth to a person living on the street with a gold and homelessness it doesn't mean it's evil right to give a homeless guy a cup of tea it's not like some kind of crime against humanity but if you think you're ending homelessness then you know back to school what the rolling jubilee organizers say strike debt is here to stay for the long haul while its first purchase will be medical debts the group plans to buy up other kinds of debt in time they began the new york but now we have chapters like all over the country in chicago portland san francisco last year they even did us this year we're going to build a movement to help wall street their broader goal restructured economic system that doesn't force people to go into debt to pay for necessities like housing medical care and education growing jubilee is just one tactic in a much bigger arsenal of resistance. techniques and conversations you've been

having if eleven thousand of you just donate one dollar having raised so much more money than expected the question now is what kind of tangible impact the occupy movements and tell you can have on the country now and more importantly moving forward. churkin our party new york so is the rolling jubilee attends a full solution for people that are facing financial woes to talk more about what happened last night i was joined earlier by aaron smith an organizer with strike debt take a look. last night was actually the end of our sixth day of donations we opened donations with sort of a test launch last friday morning early in the morning and due to an errant blog post by one of our mcs david reese we ended up waking up to thousands and thousands of dollars in donations far more than we had expected and blew through our initial goal of fifty thousand dollars within thirty six hours so by the end of the last

night actually early this morning when i checked we were at three hundred thousand dollars which is enough to abolish six million dollars of people's medical debt and that's a huge number it's much more than i know than you guys were expecting can i ask you why you're deciding to focus on medical debt first versus some of the other debt yeah there are number of reasons one it's simply easier for people to swallow we don't have to get into issues of deciding whether or not someone was prophet with their credit card spending or not although we think that's an important conversation to have if you go to our website rulings you believe or again you go to the resources section there are number of reports demonstrating that consumer debt even debt caused by credit card even did on credit cards is not usually caused by someone just running up the bills that's that's an old wives tale it's a story that that's passed around often and most of the people you find doing that are seventeen and running away with their parents' credit card and aaron i also know that you guys have been planning this for a little bit can you go and talk about the planning process how long this has been in the works and what you've got going for the future so this idea has been

percolating in activists circles for a few years and earlier this year a man named thomas gokey just decided to go and do it for himself and so he ended up buying fourteen thousand dollars of medical debt and erasing it and once he realized it were t. got in touch with us and we started thinking about how to scale it up simultaneously there's been a number of conversations that are coming out of people who met each other through occupy one of which was from the occupy student debt campaign last fall which circulated a petition to try and get a million people to pledge to default on their student loans simultaneously to to try. force a change in the way student loans and tuition is charged. what they found is that about ten thousand people signed the petition which is far short of their goal but the reality is there are already five million people in default in this country and on the student loans alone and so we started referring to those people sort of the invisible army of defaulters in our conversations centered around ways that we could get them to unite and come out of the shadows and and create sort of

a common interest class around debt and so strike that formed out of that desire and we have a number of tactics the debt resisters operations manual is one resisters organizing kit which is available at strike or it is another it teaches you how to start your own strength at chapters and we're having a national summit january twenty first in new york city it's actually a global summit and there is money to copyright there i know that that you had you just brought up this occupy manual so for those of the hordes of americans that aren't lucky enough to have their debt are raised by your organization you put out this book if we could put it up it's called the debt resisters operation manual and it gives real world solutions to financial problems like how to haggle with creditors etc so let's the let's talk about this for a minute let's talk about the you know the difference between this health self-help book and other financial self-help books. yes so you know i think you'll see a lot of financial self-help books out there just sort of trying to get you to be a more efficient inhabited of the debt system well this is much more about removing

debt from your life entirely and it's a very serious piece of work. if you read it you can you can testify for me these are very practical real world solutions written by people who've done the research and i know that one of the criticisms of the movement the occupy movement has been that it was all talk and no action that's kind of what we saw at the beginning was lots of protesting but i really do feel and maybe you can speak to this a little bit like we're starting to see this a little bit of this metamorphosis occupy wall street did of course and get involved in the sandy relief efforts and now this so can you talk about the shift in to a more global action and what we can expect well from my perspective it was never really a shift occupy sandy which you referred to and straight are really exemplifying principles that have been in place since day one of occupy you know we focus on mutual we focus on on the ground work to try and help people help themselves essentially so these are not charity projects and is not a charity project shrugged it is not a charity project we're trying to build common bonds with people to help us all

resist a system that is that is prohibiting all of us from living was that we want to live and i also do know that obviously. you guys have put out a bunch of numbers concerning the debt that americans face every day we're coming into the holiday season and some of the numbers that you put out if we can go ahead and bring up that chart you talked about student debt and the fact that over a trillion dollars this is just a student debt and then we also have that one in seven americans is being pursued right now by a debt collector so we are seeing all of these numbers we're seeing all the these statistics coming out we're also in the holiday season but obviously you guys are going to be able to absolve all of america's debt. was this more of a symbolic kind of stance in your opinion it's. it's a political statement but it's a political statement that happens to help people in the process and i don't think anyone should try to minimize that we are our goal is to foster conversations and you can see those conversations already happening about the double standard in the

debt system about how the one percent of corporations are allowed to treat debt in this way but how the ninety nine percent are not allowed to treat it in this way and by banding together we're allowed to and we can shine a light on the predatory practices of the debt collection industry at the same time and i know that the ratio for forgiveness according to your website is about one dollar absolves about twenty dollars worth of debt that's a substantial amount so would you say that people are more likely to give money to your organization knowing that it's not just a donation that is actually. a bigger kind of contribution that they're giving people who said that's a very classic american response to you know what a deal you know you get for one dollar you get twenty dollars worth of debt or a sure absolutely and also another point with the rolling jubilee is that i know that you had a lot of different kind of celebrities kind of coming out you had liz while y. and winsted from the daily show talk about their kind of contribution to this whole . event they were fantastic david reese and lizz winstead did an absolute

incredible job pacing the night we had a number of extraordinarily talented artists who provided the services for free and did this because they knew it was a cause that was worth fighting for and extremely happy to have them and they made an outstanding show you know i went to the show regardless because i was hoping to organize it but i was a rap thin the entire time anyway so you can get the video online rowlings you believe org we know that it was live stream where we know also that you made a quite a bit of money we'll see how far that money go considering that most of americans debt financial woes come from medical debt aaron smith organizer with strike debt thank you so much for joining us thanks michael. and with the holidays right around the corner shopping centers have already started preparing for the hordes of seasonal shoppers you can practically hear the credit card machine swiping but with the fiscal cliff on top of everyone's minds and the threat of another american recession looming let's look at the numbers for checked of american credit card

debt for this here is forty three point five billion dollars that's the same amount as last year but not all of that debt is to be blamed on mary society holiday shopping in fact forty percent of indebted u.s. households use credit cards to pay for basic living expenses like utilities and groceries also interesting to note the total u.s. household debt is down to pre-recession levels at eleven trillion dollars but that's not because americans are spending more wisely they're actually defaulting on their loans in fact moody's analytics says that eighty percent of the u.s. the leveraging is due to defaults so is this rolling jubilee a good way to fix our financial woes or is it simply letting people off the hook a little bit too easily laurie harshness with the resident dot net took that question to the streets of the big apple.

started by the people behind the occupy wall street rolling jubilee is a project that is buying up debt just like a collection agency would but instead of collecting their absolving the debt in an effort to liberate america from the chains of debt is this ingenious and or a way to let flaggers off the hook from responsibility this week let's talk about that depends on where the funds are coming from crowd sourced crowd source yeah growth sourcing is great if they can clear people's debt who need it and i think that the good thing to do are you into that. i think that is a yes. i'm not sure that they will go right back. so i think people need to be responsible for for their own actions where they are going to do. i still understand what they're about they drive me crazy occupy wall street does rather destroy the whole bunch of public property with their movie they haven't paid for that why don't they pay for that the text version of the pickup

what's the catch there is no catch is absolutely no catch other then the system probably doesn't want to do this because then people are free to clear that like a good idea to you. but i'm not going to buy my daughter in the u.k. only i know someone who went to africa to live for a while and they weren't bombarded every day with ever tells me so what they don't have and they said they never felt so wealthy or well to do as it living in africa they weren't every day you know bombarded with what they didn't have yeah it would be nice if companies took a little bit of the responsibility for their advertising and marketing and also for the credit card companies who hand out cards that make people that camp a receiver to kids they giving the kids in college it's a big problem yeah it's an obstacle you know it is we're just spending it removed during nine eleven what what do they say don't stop shopping because you've got to keep this big machine rolling but it simply is this going to just collapse in on itself anyways i mean can we just continue to buy and buy and buy forever and

without ever saving anything so what's going to be the massive change of rollover i mean i think it's an economic rollover i think we're seeing it now we've got economic crisis in every country around the world whether or not you think rolling to believe sounds like a good idea the bottom line is their only mission is to help the common good not wall street profits which to me is always a movement to get behind. moving on now to a story that's getting a lot of attention both in the media and on capitol hill today two months and five days after the terrorist attack that left. ambassador chris stevens and three other american diplomats dead members of congress are finally starting to learn the real story of that night's events former cia director david petraeus testified in front of the house of representatives and the senate intelligence committee is today

behind closed doors exactly one week after he resigned from his post earlier are to correspondent christine for sowed join me from capitol hill with the latest information coming out of the hearing about david petraeus is testimony. the central question of course today is who knew what and when that is after all the whole reason these hearings were called in the first place well let me start with something that's becoming very clear and that is that the information regarding these attacks in libya on september eleventh the information is not so much evolved as it has completely changed around as far as what came out of the hearing today according to those inside as you mentioned these were closed door hearings and that is that intelligence officers on the ground in benghazi have always viewed what happened as a terrorist attack general petraeus apparently today referred to talking points that were drafted about what happened included in those talking points specific references to terrorist groups al qaeda and others those were apparently removed somehow as the talking points moved from those privy to classified information to

other federal agencies they were edited and changed around replaced with words like extremist groups the word terrorist also apparently taken out you may remember megan it was widely reported shortly after that these attacks in benghazi had to do with a response to a video on you tube an anti muslim video called the innocence of muslims at the same time that there were protests going on in egypt about this video people didn't like it they found it extremely offensive so immediately following that was the public sort of proclamation of what this was about you may remember also u.n. ambassador susan rice appearing on all those sunday talk shows five different shows in which she also brought up this video that was the information that she said she had at the time that this was a protest gone bad and that was the reason for it well as recently as this week senators lindsey graham senator john mccain republican senators said that u.n.

ambassador rice is not to be trusted and that if president obama is even considering her name as one to consider for the future secretary of state position that he should. i think that just doesn't make and i was out the press conference with the president on wednesday and here is his response to that. she has represented the united states and our interests in the united nations with skill and professionalism and toughness and grace as i've said before she made an appearance at the request of the white house in which she gave her best understanding of the intelligence that had been provided to her if senator mccain and senator graham and others want to go after somebody they should go after me. well i tell

you what meghan here on capitol hill today a lot of lawmakers have made it clear that that is exactly what they intend to do that they intend to sort of cast you in a basket or rise aside stop making her the scapegoat and they will go after the president this is as you remember an issue that became political at times during the campaign it's one that a lot of people see as president obama's biggest stain on his foreign policy record and so they intend to make this an issue in washington so many things that you wouldn't imagine do become political and it appears that that might be what's happening in this case as well and christine we do know that harry obviously was supposed to be about benghazi but it kind of became the david petraeus show so what actually came out of this hearing today. will again these were closed door hearings so what we know is just based on accounts of those inside but here's a little perspective here if you drove by capitol hill in the morning if you drove

by one of the buildings where these hearings were to be held there was a line around the block quite a few people wanting to get in quite a few media organizations just wanting to get a glimpse of david petraeus wanted to see his the expression on his face wanted to maybe yell something out to him but that didn't really have been he was brought in very quickly through the book through the doors and again testified behind closed doors again meghan of course this is a very sexy story and has become that way just in the last week because of the resignation of cia director general petraeus from what we understand in these hearings there was no mention of paula broadwell only that he regrets the circumstances that led to his resignation and also he mentioned that he had his resignation had nothing to do with what happened in benghazi had nothing to do with him not wanting to testify and just one other thing meghan those inside did describe the general as appearing very somber. today interesting point i know that

peter king said he considers general petraeus a great general and also a great friend but people close the case have said that the cia timeline of the because the attack shows errors but not necessarily a failure in leadership is that the sense that you're getting from capitol hill. well again as i said before like so many things this has really become a political issue it's crazy to think that the election the president's reelection was just ten days ago and how things would have been different if this would have happened before that is of course another question that a lot of people want to know is when the president found out at the briefing i attended earlier this week with spokesman jay carney he said that the president did not find out about the affair until wednesday the day after the election so it's just so interesting to think how things might have been different not necessarily a different outcome of the election but certainly different things being talked

about by the media again. i think that it's fair to say that some really big questions are not being asked here as they're getting sort of mixed up in these you know democrats that republicans said. the feeling again just that there's a lot of missing pieces here and they may be pieces that really have some connecting information it's just sort of my hunch here that what's come out has not been all that significant or at least all that new in terms of sort of unraveling exactly what happened with these attacks in benghazi we do know the narrative keeps changing and that the benghazi attack that this story is not over yet are to corresponding christine for us out thank you for your reporting. all right well we are just one week away from an angel holiday here in the u.s. but before families sit down at the dining room table to give thanks and then promptly consume half their body weight in turkey and stuffing many travelers will need to catch a ride home for us and that usually means

a flight that means the t.s.a. security scanners and as if to add insult to invasiveness dozens of those very expensive by scanners are now being shelved and that's not all the agency is up to joining me now to talk about the t.s.a. right before the holiday rush is. transportation policy analyst for the reason foundation. hey there are a first thing i want to talk about the recent news coming out of shelving these. body scanners i know it's about ninety ninety one of these body scanners that are worth about fourteen million dollars so what do you make of that is this a good or a bad sign. well first of all making thanks very much for having me on and in some it's hard to know what to make of it so they took the scanners out of some of the busiest airports and have basically shelved them for the time and are looking at putting them into smaller airports so it's good that they're getting them out of the bigger airports but it's unfortunate that they're really putting them anywhere in my opinion and what exactly is the reason behind moving these security scanners

as if that they're too invasive or is there some other kind of problem with them so what has happened is they've gone ahead and gotten some new equipment in there are it is less invasive the screeners are actually less invasive in the bigger airports but the issue is they have so many of these scanners and as you mentioned the very high price they feel like they want to go ahead and make some use of them so that the idea is if they move them to the smaller airports then fewer passengers will be affected but of course if you're flying out of the smaller airport that's not exactly going to be news to your ears you're not going to probably want them to use them at all and work let me ask you this is this going to speed up the transportation security lines at all with these on less invasive scanners or does it really make a difference. i really don't think it's going to make a difference it should take about the same amount of time to actually go ahead and process them what the t.s.a. is hoping that it will do is they're hoping it's going to cut down somewhat on the complaints that they get about these scanners people will think there's less of

a privacy and less disappear and you shoot again if you're in a bigger port that's true if you're in a small airport and you previously had a metal detector or something else it's actually going to be worse for you so it really depending on where you are is either a benefit or a negative on what we do know is that although there is the they have been receiving a lot of criticism that yes i still have higher approval ratings than our own u.s. congress of course but another concerning development out of the t.s.a. involves the cash that you carry or that you hold on cards for a long time now the usa has not allowed people to enter the country with more than ten thousand dollars but now with the nature of cash changing people are more likely to hold those cards those money on cards prepaid cards in particular so here's a quote from a recent article that breaks the sol down basically says under a proposed amendments to the bank secretary act since then or the financial crimes and forcemeat network will also require travelers to declare the value of prepaid

cards that they are carrying known as tangible prepaid access devices the article went on to say that enforceability falls to u.s. immigration and customs enforcement and u.s. customs and border protection both within the department of homeland security which is also developing and this is the important part also developing advanced handheld card readers that can ascertain whether travelers are carrying credit cards debit card or these prepaid cards so can you help us make sense of this is there a potential for abuse or is this just the nature of the changing cash flow. well in one way it is that it is the changing nature of the cash flow in another way it does worry me that there is some abuse we know that some of the airport security workers and airport security workers have been involved in issues in the past in terms of theft in terms of taking taking different devices from customers and it seems like if you've got a large value on this card it's going to be very tempting for them to do it so we

need to make sure that there is procedures in place to make sure that this can't hack but i'm a little worried that we're going to offer this service first or we're going to have this technology come onboard first and then we're going to develop the procedures later which is not the way we should be doing it we should make sure that we have the safeguards in place first as a good point corrected let me ask you how this will all i have my what we have to like whip out our wallets and scan every single card that we have. it sounds conceivably like that's what they're that's what they're considering and again depending on how long some of the lines are in some of these airports and depending on exactly what they're thinking of this could also cause delays this could also cause maybe some embarrassment depending on how they're going about this it's a little troubling and i would really like to see some more information some more guidance from the agency in terms of exactly what they have in mind while an hour and instant sobering up is that thirty one airports across the u.s.

have moved to this faster screening process and that allows you to use a background check in order to move faster through the lines and not have to stand in those long lines and have you heard anything about this process working as it is it successful. yes so i actually think that this process is one of the better things the t.s.a. has done what they're looking at is actually moving toward more of a base screening system where they go ahead and take a look at the individuals that are flying in this particular program the frequent flyers people who they have quite a bit of information about actually they realize that these are unlikely to be security threats and they found a way to basically expedite the screening and i would actually like them to go a little further than this i would like them to come up with a three tiered system where as they have this sort of the system for frequent flyers then they have for every day fliers a less if they said system they're still going to have to have some they're still going to have to have security but the fact of trying to get rid of nail clippers and worrying about things that people could.